Category Archives: social media

I was delighted to be at @hseparty in Manchester last week. The energy and creativity was in full flow over a very packed two days. Housing, like the health and care sectors, are confronting real challenges in terms of their role and how community services can be delivered most effectively. Thinking differently and exploring the potential of new collaborations and partnerships offers so many opportunities. To get a sense of the diversity of activities and debate have a look at the #hseparty14 Twitter stream.

The #powerplayers14 Awards dinner faithfully recorded by @johnpopham was a real celebration of the growing influence of digital technology and social media across the housing sector. @PaulBromford explains the thinking which informed the Power Players list and the role of super connectors.

The housing question time provoked much interest and debate. My feeling is that every event should now include a live streamed question time! Thanks to the excellent panel Anne McCrossan, Nick Atkin, Caroline King, James Pargetter and to John Popham who suggested the idea and recorded the debate. Definitely worth watching.

“Co-production is the way forward” and how to communicate through balloons. Lovely lessons from the @bigbanglab Balloon Orchestra Workshop

Paul Taylor’s thoughts on “Do Housing Associations need Innovation Labs?” were shared at the Chartered Institute of Housing annual conference which was being held at the same time as House Party. Innovation and new ways of thinking were a constant theme at House Party so it was fascinating to see the debate generated by #dronegate which, in fairness, was only a small element of his presentation.

And finally a big thank you to Matt Leach from HACT and Esther Foreman from the Social Change Agency who had the vision and passion to make House Party such a success.

The use of social media has an increasingly important role in helping people to collaborate, build relationships, share information and resources and as of today find a job.

A challenge to conventional recruitment the #BromfordLab recruiting through Twitter has certainly generated a lot of interest. The responses to this very new way of recruiting will be interesting as applicants are being asked to demonstrate their skills, experience and social influence within their relevant communities through web content such as community engagement on social networks, blogs and other searchable publications.

I wonder whether the Open Badges movement a new online standard to recognize and verify learning will become increasingly important as people are able to display their skills and achievements on social networking profiles, job sites and websites.

I was struck by the concerns expressed about people being digitally excluded and Paul Taylor’s response that “the first thing @ConnectBromford do is is to let people know being offline excludes you from job market and that they provide support to help people get online”. I believe every organisation has a responsibility to ensure that their community is digitally included and that digital engagement is seen as a core part of their business.

The social CV is a growing trend and I am inclined to agree with Vala Afshar who pioneered this approach in the US “the future of talent acquisition is being social”

Imagine a future where you don’t have a CV or resume. A future where your talent and achievements are broken down into tweetable chunks. Your professional life , and a good bit of your personal too, is available online for all to see. You are scored according to your worth and the value of your followers. Your score can determine whether you get that job interview – Me , March 2013 – How Social Media Could Get You Your Next Job

The first and only time I start a post quoting myself. Honest.

Next week marks the launch of the Bromford Innovation Lab – a new venture that we are very excited about.

What makes it different is the way it will work.

It consists of Lab sessions each lasting 12 weeks and run four times a year. During those 12 weeks we’ll be hosting a number of problems…

Last Tuesday Mark Brown @MarkOneinFour, Paul Taylor @PaulBromfordand I hosted “What can social media do to make social good better?” We wanted to discuss the potential of social media as a place where social good could happen. One of the big questions as Mark so delightfully puts it “how do you move social media from a broadcasting medium to a space where relationships grow and where, sometimes, magic things happen?”

It was a risk for us not just in terms of the finances and resources required but because we all have a strong social media presence. What would happen if no one wanted to come and join in the conversation? Happily there was a lot of interest in #socialconvo which we see as the beginning of a very different social conversation.

It sounds so obvious really that every event costs money to put on. If it is free for attendees it is because an organisation or organisations are providing the resources to cover the costs of venue hire, refreshments, staff time and promotion of the event. So a big thank you to the people who sponsored places at the event.

What made this conversation special for me is that Mark, Paul and I first connected through Twitter. Where else could I have met one of the smartest thinkers in the worlds of social media and mental health and the dynamic Innovation Coach at Bromford a social business providing homes and support to over 80,000 people? We have a shared interest in how social media is defining care, support and community engagement in a digitally connected world and we recognise the importance of seeing social media as part of a core vision to transform organisations rather than a marginal activity.

As Mark said “with the growth of mobile technology like smartphones and tablet PCs; social media feels less like a set of websites that we visit and more like a layer of communication, community and interaction that sits over our everyday lives. The growth of social media has led to an expansion in the self-production of media and to a blossoming of public debate”.

Social media has played an enormous role in giving a voice to people and organisations who previously had no platform and offers the opportunity for sharing different stories. The potential to build more connected communities both online and offline who can debate everything from the impact of welfare reform to how digital technology in transforming our lives is immense.

Social influence and digital leadership is now coming from a much more diverse group. The new influencers use Twitter, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social media platforms to reach thousands of people. Connections are built on relationships and they are grown through conversations which can involve many different people from across the world.

Social media provides endless opportunities to be creative and challenge artificial boundaries especially between the generations if we are brave enough. Social media is also a great leveller because it is not dependent on status but rather the value each of us brings to a conversation. Despite what the pundits say about older people not being that digitally savvy the fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64 year old age bracket. 189 million users of Facebook are only using mobile devices and 25% of smartphone owners aged 18–44 say they can’t recall the last time their smartphone was not next to them.

We were very touched by the support we received both from people attending the event and the conversations taking place online. I thought it would be useful to provide links to the resources generated through our very social conversation.

The digital revolution is about people, social networks and connections not the technology. Technology is most effective when it is invisible. It is an enabler and what is important is what it allows us to do. I believe our challenge is to use social media to do something greater than what we could otherwise accomplish.

As Paul Taylor rightly observes “if social media can lead to social good it requires us to build relationships with others who share our passions and interests . These relationships are no longer restrained by physical location , our immediate peer group, our employers, or our sectors.”

Social media is not free and whilst it costs very little to set up a social platform it needs time, money and people to maintain your presence and have your voice heard in an increasingly crowded space.

Get the basics right – make it easy for people to connect with you. This may sound obvious but if you are an organisation with a responsibility for promoting social good you need a strategy for responding to questions and comments online. A tip for any organisation is to make it easy for people to find you by promoting your social media presence!

One of my favourite quotes from Mark “Without a response plan social media is just an answering machine for messages you have no intention of listening to”.

Value and respond to feedback and comments. Having a Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn profile, never responding to comments and rarely updating shows a real lack of interest in being social. Strangely some organisations do not appreciate that all social media communications are in the public domain.

An idea does not care who has it – share generously your knowledge, passions and links to resources you have found useful, enjoyed reading or even just made you smile.

People are looking for more openness and transparency in the social age. This has many implications for organisations who are not used to this level of accountability and public debate.

Being able to tell a story is a powerful and compelling element of social media. With so many competing influences you have to work hard to build and sustain trusted relationships online. Each of us has a unique voice do not be afraid to use it to tell your story.

If you would like to explore the benefits of social conversation in your organisation to explore how to use social media for social good do get in touch!

What makes it special for me is that Mark, Paul and I come from very different backgrounds but we have a shared interest in how social media is defining care, support and community engagement both online and offline in the digital age. We are also exploring what it means to be a social business and the importance of seeing social media as part of a core vision to transform your business rather than a marginal activity.

We are delighted that we already received sponsorship for a place at the event which has been awarded to Alison Cameron @allyc375.If you would like to sponsor a place at the event do get in touch! We look forward to discussing the questions submitted by participants and via Twitter.

Whether you work in the public, private, charity or social enterprise sectors understanding the impact of social media for social good is now essential. We do hope you will join us on the 29th April for a very social conversation. You can follow the discussion on Twitter using the hahtag #socialconvo. Following the considerable interest in my post “Is social media putting the ‘social’ back into care” we particularly welcome people from the care sector interested why “Social media is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate” .

Our conversations started when Stu Arnott @MindingsStu and I interviewed Mark and Paul for the Disruptive Social Care podcast. The podcasts have been downloaded thousands of times but just in case you missed these interviews…….

Mark Brown has been described as one of the smartest thinkers in the worlds of social media and mental health. Mark edits One in Four, England’s only national mental health and wellbeing magazine written by people who experience mental health difficulties. Mark is a director of Social Spider a community interest company helping people to make change happen.

Paul Taylor specialises on Innovation, Service Design and Research
and Development at Bromford a social business providing homes and support to over 80,000 people. Paul leads the Innovation Lab and he is particularly interested in the development of preventative social solutions and the power of technology to connect people. Paul was a key part of the team who developed the Bromford Deal which aims to shift resources away from reactive interventions and into more person centred customer care and support.

A year on from when @paulbromford published a Haiku Deck celebrating #60yearsoflearning and this October in a special birthday edition I invited some of the people I admire to share their secrets of being social online.

Paul and I are very aware of how important it is to share knowledge and information especially for people new to social media. Whilst we have not quite been able to achieve our aim of creating one new presentation a month throughout 2014 we hope the following Haiku Decks will give you ideas for different ways of presenting your thoughts and ideas.

January 2014

February 2014

March 2014

April 2014

May 2014

We are taking a summer break because we have both been busy with #powerplayers14 and Paul has been busy with the Bromford Lab. He has produced a series of Haiku Decks to explain the purpose of the Lab, launch a recruitment campaign through Twitter and encouraging people to get involved.

Paul initially inspired me to explore the potential of Haiku Deck with the following presentation which has now had an impressive 90,000 views.

If you are thinking of starting a blog these top tips from @MrDarrenGormley will hopefully inspire you!

Useful guidance from Paul about developing your own personal social media policy

Hot tip – add your Haiku Deck on slideshare and you will reach an even bigger audience!

I have been on the periphery of a few conversations and discussions about the use of social media both for teaching and learning and about use of social media more formally in training and learning. Some partly alluded to in this post.

I am generally of the mind that use of social media are best considered broadly within communication skills and that there may be some forms of guidance that can be offered, mostly in terms of modelling behaviours, it isn’t a subject that either can or should be taught as a distinct subject matter.

These are my reasons

1) We are still at the early stages of knowing, learning and understanding the possibilities, format and etiquette of interactions which take place online. By ‘teaching’ we codify a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way where the right and wrong should merely be an extension of what we consider to be ethical practice and conduct in all spheres of life and communication.

2) We are confusing the tools and the medium for the content. Platforms come and go – from Usenet, bulletin boards, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs – the media can, does and will change. Teaching someone the basic IT skills to set up a WordPress blog is one thing and can be enormously helpful but teaching them what they should or should not put on it?

I think that’s better left to the community around them. Yes, mistakes will be made but that’s how learning grows. If someone doesn’t realise that disclosing details of a visit on their own blog is counter to professional codes of ethics, it isn’t because they don’t ‘get’ social media, it’s because they don’t ‘get’ professional codes of confidentiality.

3) Identifying self-appointed ‘experts’ who do the ‘teaching’ is a tricky area. What makes someone an ‘expert’ in social media? Is it someone with 5,000 followers on Twitter? Numbers are meaningless – followers can be bought and it’s more important who those followers are. Is an expert someone with a blog that has a following? Well, they might be an expert in writing a particular blog about a particular subject but I don’t think that gives them an authority globally. Or is it an academic that has written extensively on and about social media?Perhaps but it is a sector where the learning by doing is particularly prominent.

Learning about the theory of social networks is fascinating but does it help with the practical implementation? And what is ‘good use’ of social media anyway? Building a supportive network of people who think in the same way? Extending ideas and focus of knowledge? Learning about new research? We have different and fluid outcomes that are personal and individual – so how can a syllabus capture that? I’m not sure. Should it try? That’s a really key question. If there’s one area that self-directed learning and understanding really should flourish, I suspect it may well be this area.

4) Social Media is about building relationships and trust. No one can teach you to be authentic if you aren’t. No one can build an authority for you. You live or die on the content, information and relationships you build.

5) I worry that by creating a culture of ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ we are imposing a hierarchy of a system of ‘people who know’ and ‘people who don’t’ into an area that thrives particularly because it is able to break things down.

So how do we learn and ensure that people learn to use these networks safely?

I say by relying on just diving in and perhaps modelling some behaviour around ‘mentors’ – asking and helping as we go. Perhaps when we see people new to these networks we all take a responsibility to offer suggestions and advice. When I helped someone set up their facebook account, I went straight into the privacy settings with them and explained them.

Sometimes people need to be guided around the etiquette within different networks and forums and a gentle guiding hand can be useful.

My worry is that more formal teaching/learning will lose the instinctive learning-by-doing and learning-by-experimenting which have led to some amazing opportunities.

I’d be really interested in the views of others about this though. After all, we are all still learning. I don’t have the answers and I am willing to be swayed on this as it’s based pretty much on my own experiences and thoughts. So please do feel free to persuade me otherwise!

This was the third ‘unconference’ I’ve been to but I’ve not been specifically to LocalGovCamp before. As it’s my third, I feel almost like I’m beginning to understand the process but each have their own flavours and soon I realised that the melding of blogging/tweeting anonymously and turning up at events which have an underlying assumption of openness don’t always meld!

There are a lot of people with a lot of confidence, experience and knowledge and they actively want to share. I felt that at times I had to stop and absorb in order to learn and the live tweeting tailed off as I found it difficult to think, tweet and reflect simultaneously. As someone who is a bit ‘arms length’ from my employers, it was good to feel a part of the ‘local government’ community and I think it’s really important that people like me (not necessarily me personally, I’m probably less confident at these things than I should be) who are on the frontline of practice and service delivery attend as we can add something to the mix – I think! It’s easy to be a bit intimidated around impressive and confident people but everyone was very kind, warm and welcoming.

I attended a number of sessions including one specifically about social care. I was able to get a broader idea and impression of the place of social work within social care and the place of social care within local authority services.

I want to reflect particularly on that for a moment.

The broad theme of social care drew more interest than I’d expected. I think I always assume that there’s little interest in our work in the ‘town hall’ because we don’t get much feedback and feel a bit distant – especially as I’m seconded into a Mental Health team and can’t get my intranet/email from my local authority employers, let alone accessing any of their databases!

I kind of suspect that they forget we exist so even by proxy turning up at broad ‘local government’ themed events maybe tips a few people off that we are out there, visiting people in their homes every day and actively conducting local authority business, implementing the policy decided in offices and being a crucial contact between the citizen and the organisation.

A lot of opportunities exist at present in the context of the recently published Adult Care White Paper which pushes a ‘digital by default’ agenda to local authorities in terms of ensuring information is well propagated beyond those who are ‘eligible’ for care services. There are also increasingly going to be stronger pushes forward to ‘ratings’ sites and responses being collated into information that is vibrate and responsive rather than static.

So where is this work going to fall? Will it be a task given within a back office in commissioning or communication departments? Probably. I made a plea that there is some involvement from the frontline services that currently exist and hope at least that will be considered in parts.

In some ways health are further ahead with more useful information sites and some of those will be rolled out into social care including 111 telephone response services – I wonder if local authorities really know what they have been tasked to provide at this point.

Social care is an area where work and progress can make an immediate and active positive impact on the lives of those who might not be those who are shouting loudest. Broadening commissioning will help, as explained in the White Paper and that will be done by broadening conversations about commissioning and honestly about what is working badly as well as what is working well.

One day, I’d love to see some more senior people within my own council attending events like this.

Could there be a similar event specifically around social care? I’d like to see it. There are a lot of people who have great passion for the sector but the true value in these unconferences, particularly those outside working hours, are that the people who attend are those who choose to and who want to make things better, differently.

It isn’t all about new technology and new media. It’s sometimes about those meetings, those one to one conversations and discussions by people who can inspire and jog each other to promote change in the areas they work in.

A last thought, which is to mention #lgovsm . I attended the session discussing the community that meets ‘on Twitter’ between 8.30pm and 9.30pm on Tuesdays and provides an opportunity to build discussions outside our specific areas of specialism and expertise across local government as a sector. It was great to meet some of the people behind the conversations and I’m enthused to follow and attend these chats more regularly.

Top down and bottom up conversations are becoming more common as some of the ‘traditional hierarchies’ are being challenged by new ways of communicating– let’s have more of the cross-sector horizontal conversations. Let’s learn in social care from health, housing, environmental health and street cleaning about ways to engage and grasp the imagination of the public and the sector in terms of promoting new ways of doing things. Let’s learn from our comms teams about how they work and operate and the stories they want to hear from us. Let’s not hide in a ‘social care’ silo when there is so much information, knowledge, sharing and desire to share with us. Those are opportunities and they should be grasped in any and every way possible.

Let’s make social care and social work work better, but let’s also make local government and local government provided services work better all round. The two are inherently linked and I am passionately committed to being a part of a local authority that delivers the best services it can for all the citizens for whom it works – yes, my ‘specialism’ may well be social care and health but my interest is in involvement and participation at a fair broader level. Thinking ‘holistically’ needs thinking beyond the sector and that’s the joy of these events.

That’s what I learned. That wasn’t bad for one Saturday in July. I’ll take that.

Thanks to those who organised, coordinated and sponsored this event. It was a pleasure to attend and be a part of it and like a slow cooker, I’m germinating a lot of ideas that I expect will take a good few months to bubble to the top.

The purpose of Blue Light Camp was focused particularly on the use of social media/technology solutions and problems faced by first response services – particularly police, fire, ambulance but including social care and auxiliary services which have attached involvement.

The power of the ‘unconference’ is to (as was said yesterday) to capture more of the networking that happens around more traditional conferences and growing some of the more interesting conversations that develop and pushing them to the centre rather than keeping them at the periphery.

After large scale introductions, the pitches for the sessions started and I could see some of the difficulties in making decisions about where to go.

I started at a session based around ideas in the ‘Art of Deception’ and took part in a fascinating and wide ranging series of conversations about some of the darker forces and concerns about the use of social media as well as drawing and sharing experiences of the benefits.

It’s easy to be swayed and entranced by the power of the digital and new waves of communication but there are still rules and patterns of behaviour to be learnt. Some ‘mistakes’ are made through the spread of misinformation unintentionally but there can also be mischief-makers and worse who can see different ways of spreading and using the power of the tool in malicious ways.

We can (and often do) make mistakes in our uses of social media. Sometimes the best thing to do is to apologise and move on. We should treat our ‘users’, ‘customers’, ‘the general public’ as adults (if they are!) and we will gain more respect through honesty and reliability as a result – but there’s a lot of latent fear of ‘bad use’.

It was a conversation that I continued over lunch with some of the other attendees and one that made me realise how near we are to the beginning of our learning cycles about both potential perils and opportunities afforded to us by our use of networks of communication and that today’s Twitter will be tomorrow’s MySpace. Platforms change, but ways of communicating change more slowly.

Immediately after lunch, I attended a session on co-production. This is an area possibly where social care are slightly ahead of the game with the push for more user involvement/engagement. What followed was an interesting discussion on how to use the ‘general public’ to have a stake in the services we need and use – even if we are not aware of it – like the fire service. There was a lot we can learn in social care as a whole though from the suggestions shared – such as encouraging engagement and responses through the use of Bubblino. How do we encourage ‘micro feedback’ and use it in our services as some of the traditional feedback mechanisms (long PDF documents and filling in ‘response’ forms) can be dry and encourage the same people who are time-rich to have the louder voices. It is an area that definitely needs more creative thought and it was useful to share information across different services rather than – to put it bluntly – to reinvent the wheel in an infinite amount of ways.

I then attended a session of brainstorming about a new potential platform/web site/forum/online space for First Responders to collate and share information outside the silos that are currently in place. It’s an area that interests me particularly as I think we naturally allay into our ‘work based’ personae in order to build protective silos and can easily forget the sometime crucial element of who we are ‘working for’ ultimately.

It’s often seen between and within health and social care. My simplistic solution to some of these problems in the past where they have existed locally is to co-locate training or even visits so that we can meet and understand the ‘people behind the telephone’. Grumbling about ‘district nurses’ is easy but when you know Amy who was very friendly and made you a cup of tea, it’s more difficult to grumble and then, when you have an immediate issue, you make a point of calling Amy because she’s ‘easier to talk to’ than ‘some of the others’ then you can see the differences breaking down.

When Joe from the local police station visited and you had a laugh with him, you’ll feel less intimidated or concerned about calling him over what you might think is a minor issue or question. It doesn’t always work like that of course, but knowing people makes it easier to speak to them about the little things that come up. So that’s how it is face-to-face – can these relationships grow in parallel ways online? I have no doubt. There are some people who I have built up relationships with online and would seek to enter conversations with them to ask questions/support in a more private forum (email/DM) and I can see that happening more frequently. Again, it’s all about trust.

The final session I attended was a fascinating breakdown of information about how twitter in particular was used during the riots last summer. Farida Vis, a communications academic who has been researching the use of social media as a part of the Reading the Riots research gave a presentation/initiated a conversation about the way the social media was used in a civil emergency situation. She has written a blog post here which I highly recommend as she explains the premise and results of her research directly. The slides she spoke from were also shared here. Particularly interesting is the visualisation which she represents about the spread of rumours and the ways the rumours were quelled.

I may well return to a more extensive post about the use of social media during the riots so I won’t feedback more extensively now except to recommend you read the links I shared above.

So after some initial anxiety about attending, I found Blue Light Camp both invigorating and compelling. I have more ideas, more contacts and more incentive to return to work and ‘make a difference’ – what I am struck by is how many motivated, interested and exciting people there are in this sector and how much we can do when we ignore some of the barriers which are often used to divide us into different sectors.

And I got a blue pig.

So thanks to the incredible organisation team and sponsors. Thanks to all the attendees and thanks for the kindness, friendliness and openness. It was a compelling and thought-provoking Sunday in Manchester. I hope to be back.

Over the last week, well – over the past few months really, I’ve had a few thoughts swooshing around in my head about my use of a pseudonym rather than my ‘real’ name in social networking or rather on blogs and Twitter.

I use my real name on Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn but felt that on Twitter and on blogs I would be too exposed. My desires to explore the medium of social networking both personally but also to increase my professional knowledge and to identify myself as a ‘social worker’ led to my initial reluctance to add my name to my posts.

I have checked out my employers attitudes to my writing which seems to be along the lines of absolutely maintaining confidentiality and not bringing my employer into disrepute but these would be bounds I would keep to regardless, not least because I am bound by a code of conduct by my profession which extrapolates out to all areas of communication including social media. My managers know I have a blog. They know something vague about Twitter in that it exists but they may or may not read my posts. There are definitely some people in positions of authority both in my local authority and in my NHS Trust who know exactly who I am and that I use Twitter – although we rarely ‘converse’ directly.

I can’t help feeling that I would be more comfortable attaching my name to my posts if the GSCC had some clear and specific guidance regarding social media but I understand that they are about to be disbanded and this role will remain within the means of the College of Social Work to take forward. And they must.

I see some very concerning uses of social media by people who claim to be social workers and it makes me worry if, by not giving my actual name (which would be checkable against the GSCC as I am a registered Social Worker) I lose some of that trust and authenticity that is so important when sharing information online. When I see someone with ‘social worker’ or ‘student social worker’ in their twitter profile describing a visit they have attended or encouraging people to expose more personal information about them into a public forum, I worry that by remaining anonymous, I lose some of the trust that people may have in me.

I’m also meeting more people in face to face settings that I have previously only known on Twitter. Obviously, it’s impossible to hide my identity there and there’s something wonderfully refreshing about being able to be open about who and what you are, do and say.

So what am I afraid of? Having established that I feel I operate well within guidelines provided by the GSCC and my employer why the funny cow name and face rather than my real ones?

Firstly I don’t want anything to detract from the work I do on a day to day level. While I would never discuss people I work with in these media, would people whom I am working with who find me and follow me, worry that I might? What would I do if someone I worked directly with ‘followed’ me? Would this be a concern or not? While I’m clear that Facebook requests are refused without second thought – where do the Twitter boundaries fall?

I don’t want to be a ‘star’ social worker (I’m not, by the way, saying I would be if I were to attach my name here but I am turning my hand increasingly to writing). I want to be a social worker that promotes the profession positively and yes, I’ll have some conversations on Twitter about whether Pandas are better than Crocodiles but that shouldn’t impact on my professional status. Indeed, the way the world is going, I feel it is increasingly difficult to divide ourselves into ‘work’ and ‘free time’ entities. We become the mass of what we do, how we communicate and moreover how we are perceived.

I see doctors, nurses and occupational therapists increasingly using their own names in these fora and I do wonder if I have been overcautious and I would actually gain far more by ‘coming out’ than I could ever potentially lose.

I’m moving away from ‘anonymity’ as a default and my defence of pseudonymity is fading. I feel comfortable standing publicly by the words I publish and I write as if I had my name attached in any case.

However, I am aware than once I cross ‘that line’ I can never go back.

I’d be interested in the thoughts of others. As is probably obvious, I am moving towards a public identification of my writing online but would welcome thoughts, comments etc before I finally make the ‘leap’.

This is a way that the world is changing. I think a point comes where in order to gain trust you may well need to have a name attached.